School meals are an integral component of education, providing space for learning and caring, while also a major social justice issue in schools (Weaver-Hightower 2011; Benn and Carlsson 2014; Torres 2017). The purpose of this paper is to critically examine ideas and approaches in school meal programs, focusing on the aims and rationales of school meals. The analysis is inspired by critical approach to qualitative inquiry (Cheek 2004), and draws on Lotz-Sisitka’s (2017) notion of (de)colonization as a frame of reference for exploring food practices in schools, identifying both absences (colonizing practices) and emergences (possible openings and spaces for decolonization) in school meal programs and approaches. The privatizing and fast-food-izing of school meals can be seen as a colonization of food practices by market logic, embedded in ideas of the school meal as a private good. The combined focus of improving health and reducing environmental impact furthermore characterizes many of the contemporary school meal programs (see e.g. Oostindjer et al 2017). This combination often implies utilitarian concepts of education where obesity prevention discourses join forces with climate change prevention discourses to fuel weight-based oppression (see e.g. Leahy 2015; Russel et al. 2013), pointing to other aspects of colonization. The studies we draw on suggests a great variety in the epistemic processes, the relational/political possibilities and material circumstances shaping how school meals are understood. Despite the variety two cross-going tendencies can be underlined: School meals are frequently treated as venues for interventions focusing on solving health and environmental problems, and are rarely underpinned by educational purposes or considerations. Our analysis points to the presence of a number of colonizing practices in relation to school meals, hereunder when school meals are enrolled in solutions towards solving problems in other social systems in society; expose children to brands in order to establish consumer loyalty; are regulated through contradictory polices of surveillance; or are used as tools in education approaches focusing on normative and ideological messaging around health, consumption and responsibility. In the discussion we address potential ways forward in attempting to decolonize school meal programs focusing on ecological and social perspectives, oriented towards notions of commensality, connectedness and “buen vivir” (good living). Approaches drawing on parental and community involvement in school meals can furthermore be seen as ways of sidestepping the colonization of school meals by market logic.

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